Tag Archives: modernity

In the real world we live in – and never more so than in the modern era – it is not the “I” and the “We” but the I/We balance and how this has changed with economic and social development across the span of history.

Thanks to Tom Griffiths for the following article.

* * * *

Last year Michael D. Yates, the Editorial Director of Monthly Review Press had his new book ‘Can the working Class Change the World?’ published. It was received, in leftist circles at least, to popular acclaim.

I came upon the book by accident as I was looking for something to give my son. Given my concerns about the relationship between the revolutionary left and the individual I consulted the Index and sure enough, an entry “individualism, under capitalism” directed me to pp 140-41. As it turned out the preceding three pages pp 137-39 were relevant contextually to what Yates concluded as the necessity of the working class waging “its own war against the I and for the We.”

The ambiguity contained in this conclusion and the manner in which the preceding pages framed it is highly problematic, exposing as it does a pseudo Marxist and ahistorical understanding of the I/We balance and a frankly reactionary position of what this balance should look like if the working classes were in the driver’s seat. Beneath this ambiguity is an ambivalence about individuality per se that borders on hostility. Lukes’ ‘Individualism’ (1973) has done us a favor here as has MacPherson’s ‘The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism’ (1962). The latter details the development, based on need, of theories of the individual that justified the development and ascendance of capitalist property relations in the struggle to break free from feudal constraints. The former, riding on the back of modernity’s achievements, illustrated that individuality and individualism comes in a variety of shapes and sizes (well it/they would, wouldn’t they) some consistent with capitalist property relations and others not consistent. It takes a very selective reading of Marx to not get this. My thoughts on this form the substance of this piece and I should thank Yates for motivating me to post them.

But I would like to firstly clarify what are we talking about when we speak of the I/We balance. The contradiction between the “I” and the “We” – the individual and the family group/community/society, is transhistorical, predating the development of classes and going back to the dawn of human existence. Engels had this to say: “Impressive as the people of this epoch may appear to us, they differ in no way from one another, they are still bound, as Marx says, to the umbilical cord of the primordial community.”

What Engels and Marx were drawing attention to was the binding, caused not by choice, but by the harshness of circumstance, circumstance that did not allow the development of difference. This describes a frozen antithesis, any movement in the contradiction being glacial and occuring over centuries or millenia rather than decades. It has only been in the modern era that this frozen dialectic has melted and the relationship between the “I” and the “we” has not only become dynamic, but has been seen to become so.

* * * *

So let me look at the context and justification Yates provides for us, a context that I can most generously describe as a ‘softening up’ process and less generously as manipulative. He begins under a chapter sub heading, “The “I” and the “We”, and takes us on a folksy recount of a holiday spent with his wife at Point Reyes National Seashore in California. En route they passed through an agricultural area where “we choked on the pesticides … the air was so fouled we couldn’t see the mountains not far to the east.” This may be accurate enough of course but we are being led along a path where the destination is ….well, let’s read on. After references to Tom Joad and Francis Drake (he landed at Point Reyes in 1579 for ship repairs) he introduces us to the native population, the Miwok, the descendents of whom still inhabit the area. The Miwok “were gatherers and hunters, living peacefully in a land of great abundance.” James and Graziani’s California Indian Warfare paint a more nuanced picture pointing out, and providing evidence, that the word “peaceful” is an ambiguous term. Yes, the Miwok were generally a peaceful people but inter and intra tribal conflict were, shall we say, not unknown as was the stealing and raping of women. Indeed a rare surviving record of a war song eulogises this feature: “Leaders, let us go out to war! Let us go and capture a pretty girl.” Cherry picking, we need remind ourselves, is not an activity confined to orchardists.

“Once the Europeans came…” the balance was destroyed. “Disease and extreme culture shock killed most of them” while our lust for land and gold took most of the rest. As he points out “The Miwoks’ “we” was no match for the white man’s “I”. One sidedness in any field of human endeavour always distorts and I make no claim of immunity, but Yates’ agenda blindsides him as he embraces (and promotes) a romanticised account of tribal and pre-modern life. Approvingly, he quotes the view of a contemporary Miwok, Kathleen Smith, who holds that her people have lived in “physical and spiritual balance” without feeling the need to go somewhere else for 8,000 years. This “requires restraint, respect, knowledge and assurance of one’s place in the world.” Not to mention a practical inability, borne of the historical constraints they lived under, to be aware, let alone assured, of any alternative.

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Idealising the past has a long history, of course. We saw it, for example, in the decades preceding the English Revolution and during the revolutionary decades themselves, where it was common for numerous radical voices to look to, and promote, the Arcadian myth of jolly Olde England before the imposition of the Norman Yoke. As we now know they were marching into the future looking backwards, an understandable reaction given that they were at the dawn of the capitalist and modern era, territory that we have become a lot more familiar with. What was baffling novelty then is no longer baffling. So why, I ask rhetorically, does Yates feel the need to promote a Miwok (or native Indian) Arcadian myth while simultaneously presenting himself as a Marxist and historical materialist?

Once booked into the hostel the reader is subjected to more ‘softening up’. He describes a ‘conversation’ with an east coast law student that degenerated into a lecture, by him, about how California was a monument to waste. In response to her puzzlement he turned his fire onto agriculture, a field of production, she believed, California to be a world leader in. This, the student was to discover, was a view, be it true or not, that would have been best kept to herself.

“This set me off on a lecture about dams, stolen water, subsidized land and water, massive use of pesticides, polluted air and water and exploited farm workers. Measured in terms of energy in and energy out, or in terms of the costs imposed on society by California’s “factories in the fields” the state’s agriculture is not as productive as the Miwok’s gathering and hunting”.

Unsurprisingly she retreats into the next room and, somewhat abashed, Yates follows a few minutes later to “make amends for lecturing her”.

In TV game shows this would be a “but wait, there’s more” moment and Yates does not disappoint. On hearing that she is a law student he seizes the opportunity to tell her (note how the only one doing much listening is her) what a Law Professor tells first years: that lawyers had to learn to be vicious by being treated viciously, a process beginning at law school. After a terse response from her to the effect that at least everyone was on the same playing field, “The woman never spoke to me again.” But Yates is not done. Over the period of his stay he observes her behaviour, concluding that she was oblivious to anyone else’s needs and he and his wife “listened, in amazement as she flirted with a German man” and how “she skillfully led the conversation to her desired outcome” an outcome that enabled her to bask in the glory of the medal she had won at the Beijing Olympics. He paints her, in other words, as a narcissist, an example of the “I” the working class needs to wage war against. Indeed he ends this section with a view of her that is as uncharitable as it is undialectical: Her studies will see her “become firmly and permanently frozen in the “I” and cut off forever from the “we””. Leaving to one side for the moment his view that the “I” is a frozen antithesis, whether she is narcissistic or not is difficult to call because of the way Yates inserts himself in the ‘drama’ and how he needs her to be as he depicts her. In the world of psychotherapy there is a term, projective identification, that describes an unconscious phantasy in which aspects of the self are split off from oneself and attributed to another. In plain language, Yates is telling us a lot more about himself than he realises. In my judgement there is at least as much evidence to suggest that Yates is describing as aspect of himself as there is evidence that the student is a narcissist and doomed to be a frozen “I” cut off permanently from the virtuous “we”.

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Whether Yates’ hypothesis about his Olympian acquaintance (or mine about him so far as that goes) holds water, his folksy tour has brought us to the kernel of his position, contained in the slightly less than two pages the index had drawn me to. “CAPITALISM IS A SYSTEM of stark individualism” (presumably the high case was to ensure we got the point that capitalism is a system). He goes on to say that “the primary institutions of capitalist society work in concert to inculcate the “I” in everyone, with the corollary that the “we” is detrimental to human welfare…For capitalism to end the “I” must be suppressed and the “we” must come to the fore”.

If he means bourgeois individualism, the kind of individualism that rests upon the individual’s right to own capital – and by extension to exploit the labor of others – and the particular distortions of individualism and individuality that come with this, he should say so. But he doesn’t, opting instead for the more ambiguous I/we dichotomy where, from my viewpoint, he persists in digging a hole for himself. Suppressing the “I” and valorising the “we”, he suggests, “would sound strange to gatherers and hunters who inhabited the earth for almost the entirety of human existence. They had no word for “I” and saw no difference between themselves and the natural world around them. Their lives hinged on cooperation and sharing, and their rituals and institutions helped to ensure that these were maintained. For them the earth was the commons, the property of all. They managed their existence in ways harmonious with nature and kept the earth’s metabolism in balance with their own.” Now what was it that Engels was saying?

This is pretty standard Greenie fare with a touch of Gaia thrown in, the “I” disappearing into a romanticised past and embracing an equally romanticised “we”. But to suggest this is revolutionary, a representation of Marxism and a synthesising pathway, is not only nonsense, it is reactionary nonsense, for while he is correct to assert that our clan and tribal forebears had no word for “I” and that their lives hinged on cooperation and sharing, the ‘decisions’ he is implying they made, were in no sense free.

It is all very well for him to have a crack at the legal student, hypothesising that she was entering a frozen “I” zone but what he describes here is an actual frozen antithesis that covered millenia and kept people, the “we’s” and the, at best, nascent “I’s” held fast within rigid and unforgiving constraints. Whether they realised it or not, they were trapped, their relationship with the natural world being precarious at best. What they did realise was that their task was one of survival and that the “we”, the family, clan or tribe, were survival units. As for the individual, the “I”, for millenia the water was simply too close to the gunnels for the individual to emerge, let alone be able to develop, stand up and rock the boat. And we can’t have the boat being rocked by unruly elements now, can we?!

Harmony was imposed by the strictures and violence of Nature, whose ‘metabolism’ by the way, insisted upon obedience. This was backed up by our own use of violence and by the development and ubiquitous use of shame as a social regulator. In this regard Hobbes’ pithy description of the natural state of humankind before the emergence of central governments as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.’ was – and remains – much closer to the mark than Yates. It bears repeating that thefirst struggle for freedom was freedom from danger, the freedom to survive. For the individual this meant complete identity with the social unit. The reason for the strength of this tie was simple – these are the groups from which the individual could expect help and protection when in dire need. The catch was also simple. There was no room to cherry pick the aspects of this system that one likes and discard the rest. There was nowhere else to go. The struggle, then, to wrest ourselves free from nature and to sever the umbilical cord, was contingent upon survival. It was upon this basis that the individual was able to emerge and is still in the process of emerging in the underdeveloped world.

* * * *

The antithesis has taken a long time to melt and we should certainly be grateful to our forebears for figuring out how to survive because our being here depended on it. This, however, is not an argument to go back, to refreeze. If we are to genuinely respect and thank our ancestors for the sacrifices they made – and they were innumerable and big – we need to move on, take the opportunities provided and seek new ones. Anything less would, in my view, be patronising and, frankly, insulting.

The embracing of the idea that traditional groups or societies (the more ‘natural’ or undeveloped the better) lived in a harmonious balance with Nature is our contemporary version of Arcadian myth and its emergence is not simply a sign of ideological crisis, although that is certainly a part of it. Strangely, perhaps, it is also a sign of our success, for at no stage in our history have we been as free from the clutches of the natural world than we are now. We have lifted ourselves above, and hence separated ourselves from, abject dependence to a more robust and, dare I say it, equal relationship. The whip that Nature’s metabolism cracks may well compel harmony but our nature has shown itself to be not so compliant. As Goethe’s Faust put it “Once I stand still I shall be a slave.” and it is not in our nature to be slaves. When Faust was weaving his magic it was a moribund feudalism that was being put to the sword. From at least the 20thC, before this in most of the West, we have had, or should have had, other targets in mind. With this Yates would agree; capitalism has got to go. But if he thinks that this involves getting rid of the “I”, the continued development of the individual, he is dreaming.

As mentioned above Yates called this section “The “I” and the “We”, setting them up in lifeless opposition. Given the pages that followed his title accurately reflected content. In the real world we live in – and never more so than in the modern era – it is not the “I” and the “We” but the I/We balance and how this has changed with economic and social development across the span of history. From a historical materialist point of view this is not only developmental, but an unfolding dialectical process. During the Stone Age, for example, the meaning of ‘we’ was single layered and, as Yates correctly points out, there was no word for “I”, although he lets slide by, or fails to realise, that this was so because there was no ‘room’ or capacity for the “I” to exist. If Yates wishes to promote this, or something like it, as a ‘lifestyle’ to aspire to, he is welcome to it, but he will have Buckley’s chance in convincing the rest of us – the modern “I’s” and the modern “we’s” to tag along, either voluntarily or under coercion.

In modern societies ‘we’ has many layers including, of course, class, as well as many layers within and between classes. This many layered aspect is significant because it is both a reflection of, and in turn an enhancer, of individual expression and development. Our ‘we-ness’ now extends in a multitude of ways formerly unimaginable. Norbert Elias sums up the significance of the options this development opens up in his The Society of Individuals: “From a certain age the individual can usually withdraw from the family [or group] without forfeiting his or her chances of physical or social survival.” In other words, there is somewhere else to go. But more than this – and this is something that Yates seems not to get at all – not only are there loads of somewhere elses to go to, there are loads of someone elses to go to, or find, as well.

Unlike the “frozen I” that Yates imagines (and needs in order to support his anti “I” distortions) the development of the individual in modern societies is necessarily accompanied by the development of society itself, of, compared to any previous social formation, a multiplicity of choices in how we can be ‘we’ as well as ‘I’. ‘We’ relationships are no longer necessarily permanent and inescapable, no longer confined to family or small community and hence no longer an inescapable impediment to the development of who we choose to relate with and how we choose to do it. Elias adds that “…in combination with a reduction in the power differential (not to be confused with equality of power), the greater variability of relationships forces individuals to take a kind of repeated inventory, a test of relations which is at the same time a test of themselves. They have to ask themselves more often: how do we stand in relation to each other? As the forms of relationship across the whole spectrum, including those between men and women and children and parents, are comparatively variable, or at least not inescapable, their exact form is increasingly the responsibility of the individual partners.” Individuals being increasingly responsible for the type and form of their relationships …? Now we can’t have that, can we? Well, not if the “we” is a Yates “we” in any case.

At least on this reading Yates seems unable to understand that as the “we” develops and becomes more complex, so too does the “I”. Each contains the other and it is important that revolutionary movements, if they are to reemerge, understand this and struggle to overcome a longstanding uncertainty cum ambivalence about the place and role of the individual, be that within groups/parties, the working classes broadly or society as a whole. It is not as if Marxism is a stranger to this aspect – I give examples below – although if one were to confine oneself to much of what passes itself off as the real deal, one could be forgiven for missing this.

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One of China’s Gang of Four, Wang Hung-wen, commented during the 10th Congress of the CPC that “A true communist must act without any selfish considerations and dare to go against the tide, not fearing either removal from his post, expulsion from the party, imprisonment, divorce nor guillotine.” As a young man at the time I was impressed by the comment but it was not until much later that I came to realise how profoundly radical it was and how relevant to the substance of this post. Yes, he was addressing a Congress, a great big political “we” and through media, broad sections of the Chinese population, an even bigger “we”. But within that context he was aiming his comments at the “I”, at the individual communist or communist sympathiser. In my view, it is only possible to swim against the tide, to be able or prepared to do as Wang suggests, if you are an autonomous individual prepared to put the interests of self aside and stand up, alone if necessary, and take come what may. In fancier jargon we can call this, appropriately, taking personal responsibility for one’s actions and the consequences they invite. It should be noted that part of this responsibility lies in seeking unity in organisational form with others, but is not confined solely to it, as Wang was fully aware.

The Turkish poet and communist Nazim Hikmet spent 18 years of his adult life in gaol for his political activities and the last 13 years of his life in exile. Much of his best poetry was written ‘inside’. A few lines from two of these will suffice: From It’s This Way: “It’s this way/being captured is beside the point/ the point is not to surrender.” And from Galloping Full Tilt from Furthest Asia: “To live free and single like a tree/and in fraternity like a forest/this longing is ours.”

The Czech communist Julius Fucik, captured by the Nazis in 1942 and executed in 1943, wrote on single scraps of paper, smuggled out of prison, what was to become Report from the Gallows. George Lukacs remarked that the ‘New Man’ appears most powerfully and richly in it and it is an extraordinary testament and example of what Wang was getting at. It can still be found on internet bookshops and I would advise readers to find it.

And lastly, going back a little further to the English Revolution (no, not the ‘Glorious’ one, but the real one) there is the example of the Digger Gerrard Winstanley, the most radical voice of the time, as well as being about 200 years ahead of it, who said, circa 1650, “Freedom is the man who turns the world upside down, and he therefore maketh many enemies.” He knew what he was talking about.

There will of course be many other examples and I have only cited these because they were (are) all in my head. What unites them all, what has them singing from the same song sheet, is that they demonstrate the dynamic between the “I” and the “we”, that the development of them as exemplary individuals was enhanced by their engagement in and commitment to the cause of revolution, to the “we”. This was not only where they found themselves, it was where they made themselves. In other words we unite or seek unity on the basis of our pre existing – and valued – individuality, not in spite of, or in opposition to it. Unity (or ‘weness’) of this type, is an expression of our individuality. It does not lose itself in the ‘we’ but finds itself at a higher level of expression. It is a synthesising process of development in other words and it is this feature that is absent from Yates’ understanding of both the “I” and the “we”. His is not a model that speaks of the future.

When asked by a journo where the best place to find comedy was, Australian comedian Barry Humphries, better known, perhaps, as Dame Edna Everage, replied “under one’s nose”. It is good advice and has far broader application than just comedy for this too is where to look for the future, or its seeds, and we would do well to take heed. Looking where Yates is looking will get us nowhere.

‘… an ongoing commitment to revolutionary politics have pulled me up and enabled me to appreciate that 280 odd years ago Montesquieu identified what was vital and, in terms of social relations, revolutionary about the city. His heroes, were a couple of expat Sultans (what else), caught up in the thrall of the street where everybody is unveiled. “Here everything speaks out; everything can be seen; everything can be heard; the heart is as open as the face”. And it wasn’t long before the fact that “everything can be seen” exposed the Bourbons and the aristocracy in general as emperors with no clothes’.

Thanks to Tom Griffiths for this contribution.

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New York, New York, So Good They Named it Twice…

And the rest goes…

New York, New York, all the scandal and the vice …

I love it.

New York New York, now isn’t it a pity

What they say about New York City?

I loved this song when it came out, its cheek, irreverence and capacity to laugh at itself. And I couldn’t help being reminded of it as I was reading the late Marshall Berman’s On The Town, One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square. Both seemed to be singing from the same song sheet.

While this post has been prompted by my reading of Berman’s final book my point in doing so springs from my view of how important the city – urban life and experience – is in human development and how ‘missing the boat’ much of the left has been in accepting both the opportunities and challenges this development has thrown up. The politics I will be drawing attention to (and where the left is, or should be in relation to it) can be summarised in the distinction to be made between the politics of the House and the politics of the Street. And let me be clear, I’m for the politics of the Street. I will give some space to the House further down, but first lets go for a walk because the modern city creates an essential link in providing individuals, in particular working class individuals, with opportunities for personal development and growth (they are individuals as well as members of a class, remember) opportunities for them to break free of the constraints imposed by the House.

What impressed me about Berman’s book – the spin Berman puts on the maelstrom that is the modern world generally and of which Times Square is a highly concentrated symbol – is its vitality and its liberating aspect. And in saying this I in no way wish to downplay or ignore the challenges that have accompanied this. Berman makes no claim to being the first to highlight this and makes reference to two French writers of past centuries to point out that the link between modernity and the Street, while an essential feature of modernity, is not new. A key Enlightenment figure, Montesquieu wrote of it in his Persian Letters (1721), and over a century later the poet Baudelaire identified the modern urban centre as a space where old (pre modern) boundaries were broken down and new possibilities opened up, coining the term “the heroism of modern life’ in the process. Times Square, the flawed hero of Berman’s book has lived, or should I say enabled, Baudelaire’s heroism in concentrated form since the 1890’s.

Berman gets down to business straight away describing the modern city as a place that enables an individual to be both oneself and someone else. Being social animals we carry the seeds of curiosity, a desire for growth and an empathic sensibility within us and the possibilities described by Berman enables their germination and growth. What is made possible here is to expand beyond oneself, beyond formerly socially or family imposed boundaries and constraints, to be able to transcend these limits and grow.

In the early 21stC the Islamic fascists are acutely aware of and threatened by this possibility and this helps explain their violent hatred of modernizing influences that disrupt and transform social and family relations. Please note that social and family relations are not being spoken of here as abstract relations, but as relations that still have pre modern or medieval hooks embedded in the flesh of the men, women and children who are the real life players in those relations. Those who identify with the left should not be too smug about this because although what now passes for the left have never approached the loony killjoy levels of the Islamic fascists or Islamic fundamentalists generally, it has historically contained a strong current of killjoyism of which the odd parallel can be drawn – that being the antipathy and mistrust felt about the unconstrained individual, let loose from the ‘safe’ bonds of the House where, historically, the teaching and maintenance of family and social hierarchy were enacted.

“One of the primary human rights is the right to the city” argues Berman, the right to a space and an opportunity for individual and social transformation. But how does the city enable this, what makes it happen? And, in any case, anticipating mutterings coming from the background, aren’t there casualties, I mean cities are hardly beds of thornless roses and many with progressive pretensions think thorns is about all they have or have come to have.

Enter Times square, what it represents and opens up.

Times Square as we know it – an entertainment and commercial centre – came into its own with electrification and by the 1890’s had already developed a ‘reputation’ that scandalized the morally precious of the day by giving them innumerable reasons to hyperventilate and complain about falling moral standards. It takes little imagination to write their script – the denunciation of public spaces like bars, theatres, dance halls, cafes and the like as “brothels” or to understand it as a voice belonging to the House.

Initially this group had, to rope in modern terminology, some diversity, being a collection of traditional moralists, including secular moralists and evangelicals. Low hanging fruit one might think. But by the early 20thC their number came to include secular intellectuals with left politics “who wanted the masses to be radical and militant and to struggle for their rights…” [just so long as these rights didn’t extend to expressions of individual and sexual freedom] “…who believed that commercial mass culture was corrupting their minds”. In spite of the cultural shift in social attitudes to sexual mores this whinge remains a very contemporary trope. And it wasn’t just (or even, if we are to be honest) commercial mass culture that was the main corrupting element, it was sex. No surprises here of course.

Both men and women had good reason to be drawn to the Square’s promise, to be able to break free of the rigid stereotypes and expectations of the House, stereotypes and expectations that had been particularly constraining on women. A good way of looking at the complaints of the moralists (of whatever hue) – the Mary Whitehouse set and the Iranian and Saudi moral police being more contemporary equivalents – was that they were complaining about the breakdown between the rigid separation of the House and Street and the power relations between the sexes that were reflected in this. This distinction rang bells for me in two ways. Most importantly (and most recently) it summed up a lot of what I have seen in the work I have been doing in the family violence arena and the refugee/new settlers arena where individuals and families have come from regions where the transition from the traditional to the modern is unfinished business. Here women are supposed to belong in the House; it is not only their domain, it is where they belong and where they have been kept.

In western societies women have been on the Street and fighting for their right to be there for a considerable period as the examples of Montesquieu, Baudelaire, Jacques Brel (see below), amongst others and Times Square indicate, but for many coming from backward or relatively undeveloped regions this fight is in its early stages. By way of example a former colleague had recorded a series of interviews with three former refugees from Africa dealing with family based violence and “upside down families”. The female interviewee, entering middle age and with dependent children, had likened traditional marriage in Africa to “a prison” where she was obliged to obey her mother in law and submit to the overall authority of the men of her husband’s family. She initially found the situation in Australia so different and confusing that, she explained, “for two years we go mad”. She meant by this that the breakdown of the rigid and hierarchical boundaries between the House and the Street was so exhilarating and discombobulating that it took, in her experience, two years for the penny to drop that with this new freedom came the opportunity for personal growth and, contained in this package, personal responsibility. That being said, she was under no illusions that upside down was the right way up.

Baudelaire’s ‘heroism of the street’ spoke of this development in the mid 19th century, but over a century earlier Montesquieu had noticed that the cat was already coming out of the bag in his Persian Letters. Montesquieu and I go back a long way, to my first year at university and we parted company soon after (read almost immediately) and too soon for me to really get was he was on about when it came to urban life and modernity. Time, Berman and an ongoing commitment to revolutionary politics have pulled me up and enabled me to appreciate that 280 odd years ago Montesquieu identified what was vital and, in terms of social relations, revolutionary about the city. His heroes, were a couple of expat Sultans (what else), caught up in the thrall of the street where everybody is unveiled. “Here everything speaks out; everything can be seen; everything can be heard; the heart is as open as the face,”” And it wasn’t long before the fact that “everything can be seen” exposed the Bourbons and the aristocracy in general as emperors with no clothes.

And this brings me to the second bell ringing aspect of the distinction between the House and the Street and that is the overtly political aspect, that which should be the bread and butter of those holding revolutionary or radical pretensions. Here I found Berman’s take on Times Square (and by implication its equivalents elsewhere) refreshing, thought provoking and speaking directly to the synthesising sensibility that sits at the analytic heart of Marxism – or, rather, should sit at its heart. Above I had touched upon the modern cities transformative qualities, qualities that enable growth and that throw up new challenges. Berman describes Broadway street culture as being created by the sons of migrants, especially from the more backward areas of Europe, who had come to America seeking a better life. With them they not only brought aspirations that challenged the old ways, but constraints that contained them, a cultural drag from the old times, representing the mores of the traditional House. One of the aspirations of the sons was for this street culture to include women. Women also wanted that space and stepped in, although not yet as equals. It was a task of the daughters (and granddaughters …) to begin to renegotiate the rules of the dance.

But from the word go the daughters were part of the action and as early as 1892, a mere eight years before the formation of the International Ladies’ Garment Union in New York, a writer wrote of working class women, lonely after a working day venturing out of their hall bedroom, cold and lonely ”to lose herself in the unending procession on Broadway.” Berman points out that “there may never have been such a vast variety of women thrown together in any one place before.”

The square emerged as a place where men, women, kids from all over the world dreamed of ‘making spectacles of themselves’, of being unveiled. Picking up the same theme late Belgian singer/songwriter, Jacques Brel, in his song Timid Frieda picked up in the mid 20thC where Montesquieu and Baudelaire had left off in the preceding two. And in doing so he was able to highlight the tensions and challenges of the politics of the Street that had now fully matured. Timid Frieda:

Will they greet her

On the street where

Young strangers travel

On magic carpets

Floating lightly

In beaded caravans

Who can know if

They will free her

On the street where

She comes to join them

There she goes

With her valises

Held so tightly in her hands

Timid Frieda

Will life seize her

On the street where

The new dreams gather

Like fearless robins

Joined together

In high-flying bands

She feels taller

Troubles smaller

On the street where

She’s lost in wonder

There she goes

With her valises

Held so tightly in her hands

Timid Frieda

Won’t return now

To the home where

They do not need her

But always feed her

Little lessons

And platitudes from cans

She is free now

She will be now

On the street where

The beat’s electric

There she goes

With her valises

Held so tightly in her hands

Timid Frieda

Who will lead her

On the street where

The cops all perish

For they can’t break her

And she can take her

Brave new fuck you stand

Yet she’s frightened

Her senses heightened

On the street where

The darkness brightens

There she goes

With her valises

Held so tightly in her hands

Timid Frieda

If you see her

On the street where

The future gathers

Just let her be her

Let her play in

The broken times of sand

There she goes now

Down the sidewalk

On the street where

The world is bursting

There she goes

With her valises

Held so tightly in her hands.

It is a fabulous song. As one would anticipate after 200 plus years Brel’s lyrics picks up Montesquieu’s identification of early promise and Baudelaire’s more developed 19thC depiction and exposes a fully developed dialectic. The left I identify with walk with Timid Frieda offering encouragement if asked for – although she seems to be doing pretty well under her own steam. The square, the Street simultaneously liberated women and presented them (and the guys) with new challenges. But there was no turning back. If the rules of the dance were to be renegotiated you needed to be on the dance floor.

As touched upon above revolutionary parties or organisations (or those with pretensions), have a pretty chequered history when it comes to jumping onto the dance floor, letting their hair down and encouraging others to join in. And when it comes to understanding the transformative possibilities inherent in this they didn’t even make it onto the dance floor. The irony here is that the proverbial masses – and most were working class remember – were showing us the way and embracing “the street where the future gathers.” In doing so they ignored the cautionary, if not disapproving tones coming from comrade central about bourgeois frivolity and self indulgence undermining class solidarity and commitment to ‘the struggle’.

Breaking out and having fun, especially where sex is stirring the pot, has been more House than Street with communist parties and organisations stepping around the issue rather than embracing it. Class struggle and revolutionary politics were serious business (this aspect is true) and demanded a commitment that found the ‘letting one’s hair down’ side of things diversionary (read, with Russian Accent) petty bourgeois individualism. This aspect is not true and is a false antithesis; it is a voice coming from the House.

This is not to suggest that the tension between the serious aspect and being “on the street where the beats electric” is ever in abstract balance. Letting one’s hair down for those revolutionaries in occupied Europe during WW2 was not an option and needed to be put on ice while confusing right wing bourgeois democrats as ‘fascists’ and drawing parallels with Nazism is simply nutty and a sign of isolation. Please pass the bucket of cold water.

What the politics of the Street does, in effect, is ‘invite’ us to look forward, to grapple seriously with the contradictions inherent in its development, those affecting personal development, our place in the dance, in particular and to try and identify the synthesising processes that take us forward, that open up new possibilities and new challenges. But this remains an invitation; free will, choice and responsibility cannot be avoided whether we accept the invitation or not. While it would be drawing a long bow to say that the left’s collapse has been due to its inability to transcend the politics of the House and embrace that of the Street – its failure to get on top of economic challenges and present credible revolutionary alternatives having a bit to say about this collapse too – the left’s conflation of the development of individuality with bourgeois individualism has seen it trailing rather than leading.

This aspect has been a primary interest of mine since my work as a relational and group therapist has forced me to confront the place of choice and personal responsibility within the context of group and family dynamics and by implication social dynamics. This has taken a sharper form with the work I have done over the past 10-15 years with individuals and groups from within what is called new and emerging communities – primarily refugee communities – where the politics of the House, the traditional understandings or role and place, have been predominant. The link between this and the transformative possibilities of the Street became impossible to ignore. Nor was the link to the left’s ambivalence and its failure to confront and transcend its own assumptions regarding individual growth and development, especially as this related to the place of women. We need to get back onto the dance floor and formulate a few moves of our own.

… western civilisation is no longer western. It is global and a far better term is modernity. By the end of this century we can expect it to have totally supplanted all pre-existing conditions, even in the most backward regions. This will be a jolly good thing too.

* * * * * *

The pseudo-left wants to stop a multi-million-dollar donation by the conservative Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation to the Australian National University for a new course on Western civilisation. According to the heads of the staff and student unions at the university it is racist to prioritize western history or culture. It mustn’t be “privileged”.

I guess we are supposed to look back lovingly at all those civilisations that crumbled in the face of the western onslaught, for example, Czarist Russia, Qing China, Mughal India, Ottoman MENA and Aztec Mesoamerica. And then of course there were the remnants of hunter-gathering society that lived in harmony with nature, and from whom we can learn so much, so we are told.

Of course, western civilisation is no longer western. It is global and a far better term is modernity. By the end of this century we can expect it to have totally supplanted all pre-existing conditions, even in the most backward regions. This will be a jolly good thing too.

Western history should indeed be prioritized over other history because that is where modernity began. The history of other regions is still important, but mainly in order to understand how their traditional cultures are an obstacle to modernity.

By studying western history, we get to understand how the connection between the economic, social and political transform the way be live.

The collapse of the Roman Empire is a good place to start. That’s when things slowly began to get interesting. Under the dead hand of Rome, innovation had been forbidden or a matter of indifference. But with the “Dark Ages” came something of a technological revolution in comparison. For the first time we saw the harnessing of horse-power with the adoption of the saddle, stirrups, horse shoes, bridle, horse collar and tandem harness. Water and wind mills sprang up everywhere. The cranks and gears used in mills would become the basis of modern machinery. Lock gates in rivers and streams appeared for the first time. There were ships that could sail into the wind. And in the meantime, the church was doing a good job preserving literacy for a later time when it could be put to good use.

We gradually saw the spread of the market. This was assisted by the political fragmentation of Europe where the local thugs (sorry, lords) did not have their own raw materials for weapons and finery, and also of course by the development of ocean going sailing ships.

However, the feudal conditions became a fetter that could only be broken by the development of capitalist property relations. Small scale production could not meet the demand of the growing markets. Production carried out with the cooperation of large numbers of workers using machinery replaced small scale individual production. Steam power for machines and locomotion replaced wind and water.

This new economic system was compatible with, indeed required, more freedom of thought and action by the individual. A totally new society sprung up.

Studying the emergence of the modern world also gives an appreciation of how progress can be a messy thing.

When Martin Luther undermined a pillar of the feudal order, the Catholic Church, the achievement did not come cheaply. Notably, the subsequent religious wars killed off a quarter or more of the population of central Europe and half the male population of Germany. About the same time, we had The English Civil War. This was critical to the creation of modern Britain but was a protracted bloodbath and lead to the death of 40 percent of the population of Ireland. Then it took a century of mucking about for the French Revolution to replace the old feudal regime with a respectable bourgeois one.

And nearer to the present we have seen the rocky road out of feudalism achieved in the former Czarist empire, China and eastern Europe. In the 1940s, we had to resist fascism’s attempt to roll back history, and that struggle cost millions of lives. So, if you think change seems pretty messy in the Middle East at the moment just look back at modern history.

The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation will of course want modernity to stop at capitalism. They are aptly called conservative. In their view, not only are capitalist property relations superior to older forms but attempts to move beyond them are bound to be a tragic folly. Exhibit one is the failed attempts in the 20th century to create post-capitalist societies on the back of totally unsuitable pre-capitalist conditions. Exhibit two is the doubtful results of “socialist” tinkering under capitalism. That sort of evidence would not get past a committal hearing but it has wide acceptance.

We then have the revolutionary wing of western civilisation that I belong to. Modernity in its preliminary capitalist form is a vast advance on everything else past or present and lays the conditions for the next stage. We should welcome its global spread.

In a letter to Engels of October 8 1858 Marx wrote: “The proper task of bourgeois society is the creation of the world market, at least in outline, and of the production based on that market. Since the world is round, the colonisation of California and Australia and the opening up of China and Japan would seem to have completed this process.” He was being rather optimistic but his point of view is clear. And notice the reference to Australia. No black armband there. (You may like to check out more Marx at the Marx Engels Archive.)

While capitalism is an advance it is still the exploitation of the many by the few. But as luck would have it capitalism is an incubator of the next stage, a classless society based on social ownership of the means of production. Capitalism turns most people into workers with no vested interest in capitalism; it unshackles our brains from pre-capitalist, traditional junk; and it creates a level of economic development that makes it possible to imagine equality because it would no longer be a case of sharing want and toil.

We can expect a messy transition. To start with those who want change will be confused about what they want and how to get there while those opposed to change will have a very clear idea on both counts and years of practice. But let’s hope the transition is not as tortuous as the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

However, that is for the future. At the moment there is no revolutionary movement nor any support for revolution. For now, fully entrenching and advancing the present capitalist stage of modernity is the priority. There are still large regions of the world where backwardness and tyranny reign supreme. MENA is a priority area from the point of view of lifting tyranny from people’s backs. Then in the long hall we have Sub-Saharan Africa. It is the most backward region and has a huge and growing population. Possibly a third of people will live there by century’s end.

Unfortunately, there seems to be an alignment of toxic trends hampering this process. In the US and Europe, “both sides of politics” are heavily infected by isolationism and protectionism. Europe has its disgraceful agricultural policy that adds to Africa’s misery and a limited ability to project military power. Then we had Obama’s appalling failure to stay the course in Iraq and to intervene in a timely fashion in Syria.

And now nobody is denouncing Trump’s failure to do the right thing and occupy Syria while arranging regime change. Doing nothing is a policy fully endorsed by both the pseudo-left and the alt-right. The former all supported Saddam and now some even support Assad.

The pseudos have also built a whole movement over the last 20 years or so opposing the global spread of capitalism. And even more insidiously, they oppose economic development because it is “unsustainable”. They want the darkies to live in noble simplicity.

To get down to brass tacks, a genuine left would align itself with the neo-cons and support their re-emergence. They stand for an activist foreign policy of regime change, nation building and economic development. There needs to be military support for change where it has a chance of success. (It is worth noting here that the recent Iraqi elections have been surprisingly open notwithstanding the violent efforts of Baathists and Islamo-fascists.) Diplomacy should be heavily focused on giving kleptocrats and tyrants a hard time.

Australia could play a special role given the failure of the Americans and Europeans. We can pressure them to act and take a much more activist military policy. Being a pipsqueak power, our contribution is limited. However, we can be good at training and deploying special forces.

The medieval soul is superficial, impoverished, miserable – that’s why the role of religion had to be imposed to fill in gaps or provide a veneer.

The modern soul is deep, complex (and therefore prone to neuroses) developing further layers of complexity. Increasingly the link is to individuality within an increasingly complex and multilayered society.

******

I want to start this essay with a quote from The German Ideology, a work by Marx that predates the Communist Manifesto by not very much, and pose a rhetorical question to the reader: what stands out to you? What is Marx actually getting at?

“…private property can be abolished only on condition of an all round development of individuals, because the existing character of intercourse and productive forces is an all round one, and only individuals that are developing in an all round fashion can appropriate them, i.e. can turn them into free manifestations of their lives.” Selected Writings ed McLellan p 191

In case we missed it – and the left has a long history in peering through Nelson’s telescope on its position relating to the individual – Marx was pointing out that the development of communism couldn’t occur without the all round development of individuals.Abolition of private property from above, via some form of executive fiat, is no substitute for the broad cultural changes that “the all round development of individuals” assumes and that the abolition of private property must be a reflection of.

A Procrustean bed has no place here. As with spirituality, we have left the field of individuality and authenticity to the right – which is why we find some of their libertarian ideas attractive (presumably this must also apply to the Spiked crew).This 55+ year old quote from Barry Goldwater is a case in point: “Every man, both for his own individual good and for the good of society, is responsible for his own development.

The choices that govern his life are choices he must make: They cannot be made by any other human being, or by a collectivity of human beings.” (The Conscience of a Conservative, 1960). It’s like Nietzsche with a southern twang. And before readers start hyperventilating over the very obvious holes in old Barry’s argument – “he would say that wouldn’t he, he’s let the property question slip through” – we need to be aware that the radical left has been complicit in effectively allowing individual agency and responsibility – cornerstones of freedom – to become the ‘property’ of bourgeois property.

Late American Marxist, Marshal Berman, (The Politics of Authenticity , All That is Solid Melts into Air made a spirited attempt to rescue the individual and reclaim territory once charted by progressive forces, including the revolutionary left, and he deserves our thanks. I’ll be dipping into his material, amongst others, below. There are a lot of reasons why what have formerly been mass revolutionary movements can now hold conventions in broom cupboards and assuming the ostrich position concerning the individual is one of them.

But before proceeding further some off road detours or context, hopefully relevant, are called for.

Why bother?

My first detour is: why am I bothering? My motivation is twofold. The first, and oldest, springs from an ongoing interest and dissatisfaction with how communist, and broadly revolutionary leftist thinking, has dealt with the individual. The second comes from my not quite as old work as a family therapist, group worker and supervisor (men’s family violence groups) and refugee support worker. I have come to appreciate that there is a considerable degree of overlap between these areas.

Human Nature

My second detour takes a very brief look at human nature. An uncontentious materialist view of human nature sees it as neither purely biological nor as an atomised abstraction along the lines of Adam Smith’s ‘natural man’. Our biology may be fixed within evolutionary frameworks but our individual and psychological makeup occur within social and historical ones. These latter therefore unfold and develop as we interact with both the natural world and the world we create and struggle to overcome their constraints; as we make our history, so we make ourselves.

Late German sociologist Norbert Elias expressed this rather well when he said “What is fixed by heredity, the range or pitch of voice, for example, merely provides the framework for an infinite variety of possible articulation.” (p36 The Society of Individuals)

Since the scientific revolution that accompanied modernity, numerous figures have expressed this fundamental truth. The 19thC thinker J.S.Mill, for example, wrote that: “Human nature is not a machine to be built like a model, and set to exactly the work proscribed to it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of inward forces that make it a living thing.” (On Liberty)

A more robust view was expressed by Ivan Michurin, a Russian/Soviet scientist (he straddled epochs): “We cannot wait for favours from Nature, our task is to wrest them from her”, while English Marxist historian Christopher Hill, in God’s Englishman (p218) quoted Hugh Peter saying in 1648, “The work of God will go on [but] I am not in the mind we should put our hands in our pockets and wait what will come.”

Hugh Peter was expressing the idea of giving “history a push”, of loosening the reins on human subjectivity. During periods of revolutionary turmoil the “task to wrest them from her”, was not so much directed at Nature as at moribund ruling classes content with the idea that it was their natural and divinely ordained right to be in charge.

This idea captures a dilemma faced by proletarian parties which led successful revolutions in backward societies. These revolutions were obviously on the side of historical development but the ‘push’ was not solely directed at proletarian revolution. There was first the not so small problem of the bourgeois revolution to complete or even get started. We are familiar with the expression ‘push/pull’ and the push in Russia and China was in both bourgeois and proletarian directions with the latter being eventually defeated by a pull that was able to pass itself off as progressive. Deng Hsiao Ping’s “black cat, white cat: who cares so long as it catches mice” summed this up. As necessary and correct as the united front with the peasantry was, it was also a compromise and one of the components of this compromise – the one I’m interested in here – is the cultural space given to individuals and the cultural beliefs and practises that corralled that space.

Clearly siding with Michurin’s stand, Berman proposes that “It is inherent in our nature to make all things new – including ourselves.” (The Politics of Authenticity p165). In today’s world of deadened discourse we would insist that this view must accord with ‘evidence based practise’. What can I say, other than: it does and in bucket loads.

The Individual in Context

Picking up the point that we make ourselves, it seems reasonable to ask: how and from what? Elias makes the obvious, but easily overlooked observation that individuation, the process of becoming individual, presumes some sort of social context because one must have a society, clan or group to individuate from. While this may seem obvious its implications are easily missed, even by so-called Marxists, who should frankly know better.

In dialectical jargon the individual and society are in relationship as thesis and antithesis, each being antithesis or opposite to the other. In more colloquial vein they occupy different sides of the same coin. Speaking of the relationship between society and the individual across history, Elias speaks of the ‘frozen antithesis’, a forced and inevitable one sidedness that cements one side of a contradiction, the ‘society’ side, to the exclusion of its opposite, the ‘individual’ side. When this happens the mutual interpenetration of opposites cannot be seen, let alone analysed, blind-siding us in the process.

Plekhanov’s favourite Hegelian aphorism that a contradiction leads forward covers similar ground. And this is what we have seen in traditional (pre modern) societies where the relationship between society (or group) and individual, the we/I balance, as Elias puts it, is fixed. And from the point of view of those involved, eternally so. Dynamism or fluidity in the relationship is absent and the individual is severely constrained and barely recognised.

There were very compelling reasons for this and they revolved around the issue of survival. For tens of thousands of years human survival was marginal and hard won. Individual survival depended upon the survival and viability of the group the individual belonged to. Initially these were small, family based units before developing into larger clan or tribal based societies and beyond. To use a maritime metaphor, the seas were too rough and the water too close to the gunnels for the individual to be able to stand up and rock the communal boat. Hence for most of our history the individual has had to serve the interests of the group and by so doing enhance his/her own chance of survival. The first struggle for freedom then was freedom from imminent danger, the freedom to survive. The struggle to wrest ourselves free from domination by nature is the basis upon which individual freedom emerges.

But this took many thousands of years and the development of mystical beliefs and practises – cultural, religious and loosely, ideological, were the secondary, and at this stage of our development, the most useful vehicles deployed to pass survival manuals from one generation to the next. As Daniel Dennett points out, harsh realities meant that we simply didn’t have the time or opportunity to turn the wealth of empirical knowledge our ancestors gained into higher level, scientific knowledge.

Romantic beliefs that surface from time to time, like those espoused by many greens, that our forebears lived in a harmonious relationship with nature, leapfrog conservatism and head straight for reaction. The fallacy of this belief rests upon an assumption that the relationship was essentially benign, if not between equals then at least between mutually respectful partners where a fair, de facto accommodation could occur. Nothing could have been further from the truth. For many tens of thousands of years nature held the whip hand. Our ancestors did as nature dictated.

The Individual in Pre-Modern Society

Alienation, here the separation of individuals from their potential to develop, was systematically imposed, unavoidable, unconscious and experienced as normal in static societies that were governed by fixed norms and traditions. Here, people must be satisfied with the roles given, experiencing themselves, Berman says, as pegs, aspiring “only to fit the holes that fit them best.” (The Politics of Authenticity p xxvii-xxviii) A static equilibrium is Berman’s description of Elias’ frozen antithesis.

This static equilibrium was dominant in the west until the demise of medievalism between the 16th and 20th centuries – (Russia across the 19th and 20thC, although if we include the Vatican in our reckoning we will need to push out the time frames a century or few). It is difficult to find a better, more dispassionate and dystopian description of traditional power and order than that given by prominent 19thC French reactionary Joseph de Maistre who saw humanity as sinful, weak and proud with savage natures that must be kept in check by an uncompromising and unquestioned authority. “…all greatness, all power, all social order depends upon the executioner.” What can one say but “yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir.”

A static equilibrium describes social arrangements that warm the hearts of conservatives and reactionaries across the broad sweep of history, from Plato to Edmund Burke, Burke’s contemporary de Maistre and beyond in both directions.

Marxists have no difficulty in identifying Burke as a stick in the mud given his immediate hostility (1790) to the French revolution and his valorization of tradition, albeit within the context that accepted the gains of the English Revolution. Plato is more interesting because he was identified by the Second International’s leading theoretician, Karl Kautsky, as a prototype socialist come communist. Late American Marxist Hal Draper, was no fan. “Plato’s state model is government by an aristocratic elite, and his argument stresses that democracy inevitably means the deterioration and ruin of society. Plato’s political aim, in fact, was the rehabilitation and purification of the ruling aristocracy in order to fight the tide of democracy. To call him a socialist ancestor is to imply a conception of socialism which makes any kind of democratic control irrelevant.”

Like so many aristocrats after him Plato’s ideal of individual perfection was one’s acceptance of the role a person was born into, performing one’s ‘proper’ function, a perfect balance Plato called justice. It was a pity that Kautsky was unable to ask simply: justice for whom?

While Plato was an aristocrat and a static equilibriumist (it’s not a neologism, I’ve checked) there is little point getting carried away with his reactionary politics two and a half thousand years down the track. But the same allowance cannot be extended Kautsky or other revolutionary figures drawn to Plato as some kind of Ancient Greek avatar of revolutionary socialism. While violent class struggles may occur within Plato’s schema “they concern only the allocation of particular holes to particular pegs. The board itself, the closely knit but rigidly stratified system of the Greek polis, which defines men precisely by their functions, remains unquestioned and intact.” (Berman The Politics of Authenticity p xxviii) What Berman is drawing attention to is, in systems jargon, first order or quantitative change. What is required is second order or transformative change. The board itself needs to go. That the leading figure of the Second International saw Plato as a prototype socialist indicates the depth of the problem for the left around the individual and the demos generally.

Under traditional circumstances people’s personal identity was derived from the roles they were born into or assigned. This promoted social stability of course (what’s not to like comrades?) while inhibiting innovation and creativity. It also shielded the undeveloped self from expectations and disappointments beyond one’s station. While systems are not sentient the advantages they confer pass on to those that are and these advantages were most warmly accepted by those who, coincidentally, sat at the top of what Hill describes as “the cosy hierarchical world picture [that] must not be disturbed lest the social hierarchy be challenged.” (The Origins of the English Revolution p345)

Berman’s take is similar pointing out that “Individual thought or feeling, insight or initiative, could only be destructive to these traditions and routines. Hence it was essential for traditional society to keep individuality from developing, at the bottom as well as at the top.” (The Politics of Authenticity p100)

The dead hand of the past, a point not missed by Marx, weighed down on the aristocracy and the peasants alike, but “it was easy to see why the upper classes were willing to make the sacrifice of self which their social roles demanded.” But no matter what station one was born into everyone “was reduced to a function of the rank which he acquired at birth – or, perhaps more accurately, to paraphrase Marx, the rank which acquired him.” (Ibid p101)

The respective autobiographies of Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Infidel, Nomad), Souad Burned Alive and Phoolan Devi (The Bandit Queen of India) describe both these aspects with an intense, intimate clarity. The life stories of these women are required reading by those serious about understanding, on a personal level, how tradition works and the risks that must be confronted in the struggle to form an authentic self.

THE WINDS OF CHANGE – CULTURAL REVOLUTION IN EUROPE

What I have been attempting to describe is the dividing line between the pre-modern and the modern world. The transformation of the former to the latter saw the relationship between the individual and society transform from suffocating stasis to dynamism. The place of the individual has grown enormously, with modernity facilitating this growth and there can be no doubt that this development has enriched those societies subject to its influence. There can also be no doubt that the transition was, or is for those societies still in transition, anything but smooth or complete.

While contradictions and conflicts of interest between society and the individual continue to exist and may often be very sharp, modern societies have created a social and political space (a cultural space if you like) where individuals can fight for and extend their own piece of the action. While we often think of these developments in terms of ‘rights’, it is worth remembering that along with creating ourselves we create the need for new rights and we win them through struggles against both nature and socially imposed impediments.

Gramsci described as a cultural revolution the period ushered in by the Renaissance and the Reformation. I’d not previously thought of these events, or movements, as cultural revolutions before, but he was right. They sounded the death knell of medievalism and it is worth remembering that the transition was protracted, violent and characterised by what we have come to realise as historical transformations with their obligatory twists and turns. This latter point should serve to reassure, by the way – looking back we can see that frozen antitheses were melting all over the place, a fact that should encourage us to look for the current melting points.

These transformations ushered in the modern era and with it the modern individual. Most bourgeois opinion, that is, most ‘opinion’, prefer to either be overtly negative about revolutions or to ignore them. This also applies to attitudes of any oppositional movement that comes from below – cultural or otherwise – where the default perspective offered is, as suggested, to not only turn a blind eye or to focus on the negative aspects but to demean and treat with contempt the ignorant or stupid masses. Where are Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters pumping out Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive when you need them I ask rhetorically.

The threat and fear of ‘chaos’ is an oft repeated mantra by both conservatives and reactionaries, especially as revolutions threaten or are in their midst. Communist parties, especially those in power, have shown themselves to be prone to catching this bug and the challenges it throws up in spite of their need to launch cultural upheavals or revolutions. This latter is surely part of the job description, a recognition that it’s ok to consciously and deliberately give history a push. But the modernist cultural revolution, if I can call it that, was not prescribed or consciously directed and the participants were most unlikely to have had a clear idea about how things would unfold or where they would end up. Developments were more akin to an unpredictably moving but unstoppable tsunami, moving forward here, being held back or pushed in other directions there, leaving untouched some remnants and swallowing up others. One way of reading Hill’s histories is with this in mind. So too with Shakespeare who wrote his plays as the tide began to surge.

The ‘left’, of whatever stripe, speaks of and seeks to work with ‘social units’ – the working class, unions or worker or community organisations, parties etc. But unless this contributes and leads to an ongoing transformation of the social unit or group (getting rid of the board), and thereby to the opening up of opportunity for individual growth and transformation, the ‘left’ would be pissing into the wind and indicating that, on this matter at least, it has failed to understand or embrace the modernity that Marx and Engels, amongst many others, were so enraptured by.

Group maintenance without transformation is a dead end. Group transformation without individual transformation, is politically fraudulent and reactionary, seeking to maintain the existing or traditional power relations within the group, community or society. As repeated once already, the board itself has to go.

THE EMERGING INDIVIDUAL

Hill makes the point that the transition from tribal to village society involved a shift from kinship (blood bond) to neighbourhood; that is, from tribalism to feudalism; and that the transition from parish to sect was a shift from local community to voluntary organisation. Voluntary organisation cannot occur without the existence of self-motivated individuals. Today this is the norm, indeed so normal as to barely raise comment. In the social sphere alone we see a plethora of activities, clubs, associations and the like which people engage in freely. It covers all classes, ages and tastes and could not occur without freely choosing individuals, all taking responsibility for fulfilling certain of their needs.

But the communist movement has struggled with the free aspect of the individual uncritically buying (I use the term advisedly) the bourgeois assertion that central to this freedom is freedom of property ownership and hence of capital. The individual that emerged from the medieval straightjacket was associated with the development of capitalism, capitalists and aspiring capitalists, what Hill termed ‘the industrious sort’. One sidedness in an analysis is always a problem and an embarrassing one when the analysis is promoted as dialectical. Here the matter of the individual is left dangling, a frozen antithesis, stained with its association with the ‘industrious sort’ so central in the development of capitalism (Tawney’s depiction makes this connection a defining characteristic). Individuality, individualism, bourgeois individualism and its junior, aspiring cousin petty bourgeois individualism, are generally carelessly treated as synonyms. While some common ground between them is real, contradictions and points of divergence emerged early on. Failing to see this, or downplaying their importance and lumping them all together, is more than careless, it is lazy and betrays an ambivalence about the place of the individual absent from Marx and Engel’s thinking.

As mentioned Berman has attempted to correct this by focusing on the emergence of the individual, as has Hill. One of Hill’s great contributions has been his determination to track and expose the development of both sides or aspects of the individual’s development in England from the 16th to the 18th centuries. That is, the individual’s connection to bourgeois economic and social development, the aspect that has ‘form’, and the flourishing of the individual among the ‘lower sort’, the members of the ‘many headed monster’. (Change and Continuity in 17th Century England)

Failure to distinguish between capitalism and modernity

Associated with this has been a failure by the left to distinguish between capitalism and modernity. Each has developed together and each has, within itself, contained the possibility of the other. This is best seen and summed up in the “all that is solid melts into air’” aspect, the dynamism, that has been common to both. By the early 19th C it was becoming possible to clearly distinguish between the two and to see that the development of one was frustrating, distorting and impeding the development of the other. Marx’s writings were very much concerned with this distinction (we can see it too in Goethe’s Faust, albeit in a less politically conscious way); indeed he and Engels were key figures in making it. In effect they were saying: I like this part, the dynamism, the restlessness, the urge to develop, the newfangledness, which in turn enables the individual to develop; but not this part, the tying of labour, in perpetuity, to market relations and the exploitation and alienation that goes with this.

Marx and Engels spent most of their lives demonstrating that capitalist economic and social development will materially create the conditions where it can be superseded. Where, in other words, modernity can be fully transformed and shed itself of its capitalist constraints.

The identification that left wing radicalism has made between the capitalist economy and the liberal state with ‘individualism’ has also seen it linking radicalism with, as Berman puts it, “a collectivism that negated individuality.” This is succinct and accurate. A collectivism so understood, one that attempts to negate the ‘newfangledness’ so admired by Marx, will take us nowhere other than a dead end. More disturbingly it aligns a radical, anti-capitalist sensibility regarding the individual with the premodern. Indeed, that is what it is a hangover from. It is backward looking and as communists or assorted radicals we need to remind ourselves that that is not the direction we should be heading.

The Marxist Archive reflects this problem and makes its own contributions (see the entries for ‘Individual’, ‘Individualism and Collectivism’ and ‘Autonomy’ for examples). While not wishing to make such a detour as to get lost let me make the following points. Its entry for ‘Individual’ goes no further than formal logic or the medieval Latin word ‘individuum’ in describing particular, indivisible things. This includes individual humans, of course, but also individual rocks, horses or flies crawling up a wall. Unique persons, with their multiplicity of individual characteristics fail to make the team. ‘Individualism and Collectivism’ is more nuanced, but remains problematic (or should I say symptomatic?). It speaks of collectivism transcending or sublating individualism; that is a collectivism which does not suppress the individualism of bourgeois society, but supersedes it. This gets closer, but supersedes to what? Primacy is given to collectivism with the transcendent, dialectical leap, only relating to it. Individualism, which remains ‘bourgeois’, or consistent with the individuality that emerged under capitalism, remains unsuppressed but also untransformed. It is as though dialectics has had a seniors’ moment and forgotten that individuality too, must transcend its bourgeois limits.

Individuum (and its siblings individualis and individuus) was, in relation to the now emerged individual (bourgeois or otherwise) a word at a low level of synthesis, a direct reflection of Elias’ frozen antithesis and Berman’s static equilibrium, characteristic of undeveloped or backward societies. A collectivism that negates, or awkwardly slides over individuality within a modernist context, that strips the particularities of individual persons and highlights only those features common to all is backward looking and reactionary.

The bods at the Archive, seem to understand that the individual is important but their ambivalence gets in the way of them seeing the matter as dynamic. The antithesis remains frozen.

But if dialectics has meaning this must also indicate that we also have a problem with the universal, although this is not an issue for here.

Although we are social creatures who define ourselves in relation to the other, modern societies enable identities to be achieved and transcended. The synthesis has developed to a much higher level. Roles and limits are transcended regularly and to such a degree we barely notice. Your average citizen at work transcends him/herself out of work or even at work – is he/she a junior sports coach, team manager, assistant this or that, the secretary of a club, an amateur whatever, a blogger … How about a revolutionary? Now, that’s a novel idea!

Berman points out that “To be authentic, authentically “oneself”, is to see critically through the forces that twist and constrict our being and to strive to overcome them” (The Politics of Authenticity p xiv). In a repressive society people cannot be themselves within the system but must strive to become themselves in spite of the system. This can take private, even mystical forms, as with the Stoics, or openly rebellious forms where people can only be themselves, or strive to become so, against the system. Revolt, Berman reminds us, is the only mode of authenticity a repressive society allows. It is not only right that we rebel against reactionaries, but in doing so we act authentically.

If the theory of revolution grows out of and develops alongside the idea of authenticity, we need to be able to evaluate how well proletarian parties like the Bolsheviks and CCP fulfilled or sought to fulfill this within the boundaries of what was historically and socially achievable. Within the west I think we’ve been under performers and more aligned with the historically regressive. Revolutions in undeveloped countries present a more complex picture. With 80/90% of the population in China, for example, being peasant and where feudalist culture predominated, the communists had to work with the raw materials at hand and an emphasis on a collectivism that downplayed individuality was probably unavoidable. That was certainly what they inherited. This did not mean that individuality did not develop. It is difficult to read Lu Hsun or any of William Hinton’s accounts without seeing new and vibrant individuals emerging. But there is also an ambivalence borne of the circumstance (the constraints) of these revolutions. In his very sympathetic Reconstructing Lenin, Hungarian historian Tamas Krausz remarks that “the autonomy of the individual and of personality as the communal societies’ main context of unfolding was missing not only from Lenin’s legacy, but from the legacy of the entire period, which insisted on other areas of development.” (p369)

What I find disappointing is the lack, or apparent lack, of theoretical material from either the CCP or the Bolsheviks that laid the realities on the table in such a way that indicated that they knew the growth of the individual was an important goal and that it was occurring, but that circumstances did not allow them to focus on this. This distinction, and its rationale, does not strike me as beyond the wit of the players to articulate. While my own ignorance may be the driver here, the lack of much written material indicates that it was not seen as a problem. This reinforces my hunch that there has been a deep ambivalence about the individual in revolutionary movements generally and that this has been dealt with through avoidance and a one sided focus on notions of collectivism.

One of the problems I have with this (there are a few) is that this ambivalence leaves the door open to the development of anti-capitalist feelings that spring from a backward looking romanticism, a yearning for a pastoral, harmonious, pre industrial past, based on scarcity and frugality.

This reactionary yearning looks to an idealised, non-existent past and posits it as the future. Its most modern form can be seen amongst extremist greens and Islamic fascist groups like ISIS. It certainly had a presence in the English Revolution and re-emerged as a current of the Romantic period that arose partly in response to the Industrial Revolution. However, as Berman states, we envision equality within an urban, dynamic economy based on growth and abundance. (p36) And Amen to that!

During the 18thC and 19thC that reactionary yearning for harmony and stability was expressed strongly in reactions to the Enlightenment and to the French Revolution. Prior to the revolution reactionaries on both sides of the English channel were busy drawing the cultural authoritarian wagons into a circle, drawing upon Neo-Classicism from the arts and Newtonian physics, in order to promote social stability by encouraging people to submit to fixed, eternal rules, externally imposed and closed to scrutiny. This de facto united front between a decaying French feudalism and an ascendant British capitalism occurred because both ruling classes required social stability. The British were more successful having had a revolution, albeit limited in its extent and aims; the French were not because they hadn’t. But on both sides of the Channel ruling class anxiety was a clear sign that the horse had well and truly bolted. Whilst it is obvious that there were a great many other issues that drove the revolution, the progressive unfettering of the individual, his/her emergence as subjects on the social and political arena, was prominent among them. Following similar developments that had been occurring in Britain, the third estate mob was becoming less and less mob like.

By 1790, for example, before the direction of the revolution had become clear, Edmund Burke was quick to fire a shot across the bows, dismissing the philosophes and the revolution that Burke would have seen as their mongrel child, as “sophisters, economists and calculators. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom.” Proud submission? Servitude an exalted freedom? Warming to his theme and moving seamlessly into hyperbolic overdrive he predicted that “All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonised the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics all the sentiments that beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by the new conquering empire of light and reason. All decent drapery of life is to be torn off …” (Reflections… paras 127-8)

While Burke’s prose is simultaneously impressive and nausea inducing he employs a sophistry unmatched by any of his erstwhile French targets. We should keep in mind that de Maistre’s reflections, made after the revolution, dispensed with Burke’s draperies and cut to the chase. Berman points out that what Burke was effectively admitting to was that the “whole social system of Europe was essentially a system of lies” which is where de Maistre’s executioner comes in as reinforcer. Shelley exposed these lies in his poem Anarchy, written in response to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. It is good to have Burke in mind while reading it.

French reactionary responses were also predictably hostile. What had been lost was the clarity and predictability of medieval Catholicism, especially the stability and obedience to medieval hierarchy. Individuals, they argued, had been severed from their traditional (and subservient) ties. The atomised, uncontrolled individual, the individual who no longer respected the sanctity of the place of his/her superiors, was a threat to social cohesion and aroused consternation among those superiors for whom de Maistre was an influential spokesperson. Individualist liberalism was destructive to the social order and de Maistre’s uncompromising worldview has cast a long shadow.

Had figures like de Maistre simply faded into the background and, along with their ideas, exited stage right, we could happily channel the Mandy Rice-Davies line of “well he would [say that] wouldn’t he” and move on. What is of ongoing interest about de Maistre, aside from his ‘casual’ attitude on maintaining social order, is his influence on Saint-Simon, one of the Utopian Socialists’ heavy lifters, a man who had a significant influence on the development of numerous socialist currents that developed in the mid to late 19thC. Both men were contemporaries and it was de Maistre’s thinking about social cohesion and political authority that garnered influence. Auguste Comte, Saint-Simone’s secretary and father of sociology, frequently and approvingly cited him.

Culture that draws its authority from a closed and oppressive past cannot prepare or aid its members to negotiate the permanently turbulent waters that modernity throws up. For such cultures, the future has already happened and all it does is prepare people for more of the same.

Historical events demonstrate more powerfully than words that this has a shelf life. Taking sides in the individual/social divide, however, presented real challenges, cultural and political, that have seen ostensibly radical and revolutionary ideologies promote ideas that bore disturbing similarities to feudalist or semi feudalist ideas of community with limited space for individual development, let alone transformation.

The development of society to higher levels (higher levels of syntheses as Elias would put it) enables higher levels of individuation and individual development, opening the way to increased fulfilment (and increased dissatisfaction); increased chances of happiness (and increased chances of unhappiness and disappointment), all of which are society specific. So which road, the high road or the low road? Old maritime charts used to have “this way there be dragons” to describe unknown waters and discourage exploration. Dragons might be scary, but “this way there be development”.

This of course is not a one way street as the development of the individual in modern societies is necessarily accompanied by the development of society, of a multiplicity of choices in how we can be ‘we’ as well as ‘I’ and ‘we’ relationships are no longer necessarily permanent and inescapable, no longer a constraint to the development of free will and personal responsibility.

The working class itself has made it clear through its actions and choices that it values individual growth and development and the economic development which facilitates this.

Gramsci describes as a cultural revolution the period ushered in by the Renaissance and the Reformation. I’d not previously thought of these events, or movements, as cultural revolutions before, but he was right. They sounded the death knell of medievalism and it is worth remembering that the war was protracted, often bloody and characterised by what we have come to realise as historical transformations with their obligatory twists and turns. (This latter point should serve to reassure.)

It was from this cultural revolution that the modern individual arose.

There was a Cultural Revolution (CR) in Europe and it was accompanied by political struggle, war and revolution. It ushered in the modern era. Because of poor historical and theoretical understandings we are content to think that a CR is something that is launched – as it was by Mao in China. Communists in power will indeed launch GPCRs – its surely part of the job description, part of the deal in waging revolution. It is a conscious attempt to push things forward. Prior to this CRs were not prescribed or consciously directed and were more like a dogs breakfast (could do with a better description). They moved forward in fits and starts, often suffering defeats and being impossible to distinguish from the political and social turmoil that spewed it up. A slow moving but unstoppable tsunami, creeping forward here, being held back there, leaving untouched some remnants and swallowing up others. One way of reading Christopher Hill’s histories is through a cultural lens.

From the times of the English Revolution the big bourgeoisie in Britain only recognised a political personality, an individual, if they had property. This itself was clearly reflected in the franchise which, at the time of the revolution, was given to only about 3% of the population, a situation that changed only very slowly due to a franchise version of ‘bracket creep’ rather than reform. Gramsci makes this point regarding recognition in relation to the Catholic Church (no doubt he was right) but my thinking took me to the English Revolution and the rise of the capitalist class in Europe generally. The point is that a person is not worthy in their own sake, but only insofar as one is accompanied by wealth and the power implicit in wealth. The masses (and many pejorative terms exist to describe them) are the counterpoint to the valued, wealthy man of property and they arouse disdain and a strange mixture of indifference and fear. So long as they have no power and are accepting of this, it is the former; when they cease to accept their proscribed role and seek redress, it is the latter.

The primitivist appeal to the state of nature made during the revolution’s century saw man as a rational but isolated, atomized individual, set free from society. The appeal to the individual conscience, the religion of the heart, was ultimately an appeal to changing social norms. (Hill, Change and Continuity in 17th C England p 116). This too is the appeal of Locke’s tabula rasa.

Reactions to the French Revolution and their implications for individuality.

1. “… Semblance, I assert, must actually not divorce itself from Reality. If semblance do – why then, there must be men found to rebel against Semblance, for it has become a lie.” Carlyle, “The French Revolution.”

Marshall Berman’s page on this raises the matter stated by Marx that the dominant ideas of any epoch are those of the ruling class ->
xxxi Burke saw in 1790, before the revolution’s direction was clear, that the Enlightenment – the multitude of “ sophisters, economists and calculators”, had seized the initiative and “extinguished forever” “the glory of Europe”.
“All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonised the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics all the sentiments that beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by the new conquering empire of light and reason. All decent drapery of life is to be torn off …”

Beautifully written tripe and an admission that the ”whole social system of Europe was essentially a system of lies.” The artifices of ruling class life and the ideological justifications of it were laid bare. Once again the emperor had no clothes – but this time they had been torn off. Semblance had not only become a lie, it had been seen to become so.

This masquerade, as Berman calls it, may well have been subtle for its beneficiaries (here straight jacketing the self expression of those within it) but it was hardly subtle for the peasants or the emerging proletarians. In Britain it was brutal (the Industrial Revolution) although Burke’s prose applies equally to the draperies employed by the capitalist ruling class in Britain as it did for the decadent feudal ones of Europe.

THE EMERGING INDIVIDUAL

a) in England – the role of Puritanism

Hill makes the point that the transition from tribal to village society involved a shift from kinship (blood bond) to neighbourhood – ie, tribalism to feudalism; and that the transition from parish to sect was a shift from local community to voluntary organisation.

Voluntary organisation cannot occur to any significant degree without the existence of self motivated individuals. Today this is everywhere around us. If we exclude work from our reckoning (it is a necessity and as such limits the ground in which voluntary organisation can operate) we see a plethora of activities, clubs, associations and the like which people engage in freely. It covers all classes, ages and tastes and could not occur without freely choosing individuals, all taking responsibility for fulfilling certain of their needs.

The communist movement has struggled with this aspect, that is, the ‘free’ aspect of the individual. A difficulty I see is that the free individual, as he/she emerged from the medieval quagmire, has been associated with the development of capitalism. In other words the free individual has more than likely been one of the ‘industrious sort’ so central and instrumental in the development of capitalism, in England especially (Tawney’s depiction makes this connection a defining characteristic). Bourgeois individualism has ‘form’ and communist movements have rightly identified these social elements (and the economic relations which generate them) as self serving and willing (and needing, more to the point) to exploit others.

This aspect of the individual’s development, while true, is also one sided. And it’s with the other side that we have had trouble understanding, coming to terms with and more importantly, relating to. Berman, in ‘The Politics of Authenticity’ and ‘All That is Solid…’ has, I think, attempted to correct this by focusing on the other side, that which deals with the emergence of the individual due to the development of modernity.
From a different discipline so too has the English Marxist historian Christopher Hill. One of Hill’s great contributions has been his determination to track and expose the development of both sides or aspects of the individual’s development in England from the 16th to the 18th centuries. That is, the individuals connection to bourgeois economic and social development, the aspect that has ‘form’, and the individuals development caused by modernity (although I cannot recall him using that term).

The Levellers wanted to extend voting rights to all adult men with a proprietary stake in the realm. While limited re today’s understanding, this demand was radical and aimed against their class enemy. The bourgeoisie, for its part, successfully sought to deny the common people this right. What is significant about this struggle is that it indicates that two streams of individuality/individualism had emerged – one was that of the bourgeoisie proper and the other that of the common people, the latter being led at this historical stage by the Levellers. (Paine’s ‘Rights of Man’ represent the logical development of the Levellers position.) This latter represents the historical tradition that we need to identify with. Its development took, what we could call, petty bourgeois and proletarian directions; Paine on the one side, Marx on the other. Figures like Goethe and Shelley sit somewhere in between, but much closer to Marx, I think.

Capitalism and modernity are not the same. Each has developed together and each has, within itself, contained the possibility of the other. This is best seen and summed up in the “all that is solid melts into air’” aspect, the dynamism, that is common to both.

By the early 19th C it was becoming possible to clearly distinguish between the two and to see that the development of one frustrated, distorted and held up the development of the other. Marx’s writings were very much concerned with this distinction; indeed he and Engels were key figures in making it. In effect they were saying: I like this part, the dynamism, the restlessness, the urge to develop, which in turn enables the individual to develop; but not this part, the tying of labour in perpetuity to market relations and the exploitation and alienation that goes with this. Marx and Engels spent most of their lives demonstrating that capitalist economic and social development will materially create the conditions where it can be superseded. Where, iow, (in other words) modernity can be fully transformed and shed itself of its capitalist aspect.

b) The 18th C Enlightenment

xiv
‘To be authentic, authentically “oneself”, is to see critically through the forces that twist and constrict our being and to strive to overcome them” In this sense we see Burke as not authentic, just true to his class (see comments on Burke’s take on the French Rev).

We are affected ourselves by the twistings and constrictions as we do this. We may move toward authenticity through willingly taking on (or perhaps even maintaining) other twistings as we identify and seek to overcome or overthrow the main source of that which twists and constricts us. (This needs some thinking through).

p41
The notion of virtue draws a sharp line between the self and society: the self is virtuous only when it surrenders its freedom and submits to the laws of the society that imposes them. Yep; and clearly an important reason for women in particular to not be virtuous. When Berman wrote that sentence – the second is mine – he could not have imagined how prescient it would turn out to be for Muslim women in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

p16
In the Persian Letters Montesquieu tries to show that no social system can provide human happiness unless it posits – and its Government guarantees, a basic human right: the right of every person to be oneself.
My Comment:
a) this seems self evident as one needs a ‘self’ to get this.
b) the link between this idea and the American Rev, and its emphasis, well developed by the Revolution and crystal clear by the 19th C, on individualism.
c) The floods of migration from Europe to the Americas and a little later to Australia and other areas of the new world indicate a strong drive for economic betterment for family and for self. This often took the form of a sacrifice for one’s children, for the next generation, and it bore fruit. This drive has been overwhelmingly positive and progressive.
d) The self, oneself, is not a static entity. The self evolves, develops according to the constraints and possibilities of the level of social development in a given society. This applies between social systems and within them. This is especially so with capitalism
e) If communists don’t ‘get’ this, respond to it, work with it (not against it) we will be relegated to the margins of history, a curio blip, like a number of historically redundant beliefs and trends.

p22
“The basic question, now, is how much freedom do the members of any state or society have to be the individuals they are – how far, in other words, is human authenticity allowed to unfold?”
Comment: This is historically and socially mediated, constructed even. As ‘they are’, the degree of unfoldingness, is developmental. This also applies within a historical epoch, to movements.
It applies to us on two levels:
1. The general, the historical.
2. The demands, impacts on oneself of the movement, group, whatever.

p31
A repressive society – and this covers all pre capitalist societies and non democratic capitalist societies – creates a radical gap between people’s social identities (the roles they are forced into) and their real selves/identities. Personal identities must therefore be achieved. People cannot be themselves within the system but must strive to become themselves in spite of the system. This can take private, even mystical forms (see above) where the contradiction is maintained and where, therefore, authenticity cannot be achieved; or against the system. Here people cannot be themselves within the system and strive to become themselves against the system. Thus, Berman argues, revolt is the only mode of authenticity a repressive society allows (a variant of where there is oppression there will be resistance to that oppression, where our true nature is oppressed, revolt is inevitable).

The theory of revolution grows out of, and develops alongside, the idea of authenticity. This is consistent with our revolutionary history going back to the English Revolution. The question is: how well have proletarian parties, especially the successful ones – Bolsheviks, CCP being foremost – fulfilled this – or sought to fulfil – within the boundaries of what was historically and socially achievable? Within the west I think we’ve been mainly bench warmers and not players. Revolutions in the undeveloped economies led by communist parties present a more complex picture. With 80/90% of the population in China, for example, being peasant and where feudal practises, ideas and habits predominated, the communists had to work with the raw materials at hand and an emphasis on a collectivism that downplayed individuality was probably inevitable and necessary. (This did not mean that individuality did not develop – it did, in leaps and bounds – but that this aspect was not overtly promoted.) What I find disappointing is the lack (or maybe it’s an apparent lack?) of theoretical material from either the CCP or the Bolsheviks that laid the realities on the table in such a way that indicated that they knew the growth of the individual was an important goal, and a Marxist one to boot, but that circumstances did not allow them to focus on this. This distinction, the rationale, does not strike me as complex or beyond the ability of most people to ‘get’. That there does not appear to have been much written about this indicates that it was not seen as a problem. This reinforces my hunch that there is a deep ambivalence about the individual/individuality in revolutionary movements generally that has been dealt with through avoidance and a one-sided focus on notions of collectivism.

p36
A comment on the romantic yearnings for an idealised, Arcadian past. What is yearned for is an equality of a simple, static, face to face agrarian economy based on scarcity and frugality.
And this is what makes it a reactionary yearning – it looks to the past, an idealised and non-existent one at that – and posits it as the future. Its most modern form can be seen amongst extremist greens and Islamic fundamentalists like the Taliban. It certainly had a presence in the English Revolution and re-emerged as a current of the Romantic movement which coincided with and responded to the Industrial Revolution.
We, however, envision, as Berman states, equality (and authenticity) within an urban, dynamic economy based on growth and abundance. And Amen to that!

p85
Montaigne: (16th C) Nothing within the range of human experience was alien to him – anticipating Marx in the 19th who was no doubt paying tribute when he said it.

Rousseau’s alienation:
was self alienation. This was new. Rousseau: “they transform themselves into totally different men” (Confessions); in other words, the source of this alienation was men themselves. Philosophers had hitherto enjoined people to “know thyself”. Rousseau deepened this – not just to know, but to be oneself. His Confessions were aimed to bring his authentic self into being. The injunction to know oneself assumes a core self, an inner reality that, while masked, shrouded, hidden beneath layers of socially prescribed falsities (hypocrisies, two facedness) existed and was ready for development. The idea of a true self/false self dualism fits into this. Rousseau’s idea was much more radical. He posited that the inner self itself was a problem – that the self was only potentiality, something yet to be attained.

While stripping away the layers of the false self was a valid ‘work in progress’, the more important task was the actual creation of the self – a ‘work in progress’ from go to woe.

“It is no longer necessary for the self to go back into the past to search for its source. Its source is here and now, in the present moment”. This is a radical idea and one picked up within the psychotherapy field in the last century. Its truth, its value needs to be counter-posed to the observation made by Marx: “we suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development. Alongside modern evils, a whole series of inherited evils oppress us, arising from the passive survival of antiquated modes of production, with their inevitable train of social and political anachronisms. We suffer not only from the living but from the dead.” Capital 1 13. Together these views form a dialectical whole.

p88
“…Rousseau showed how all the modes of personal identity – both traditional and modern – were actually modes of depersonalization, stumbling blocks which kept the individual self from coming into its own.” Marx would not have a problem with this.
“Servitude is so unnatural to man” writes Rousseau in Julie, “that it could not exist without some discontent”. He is grappling with a truth (let’s leave aside the unnatural bit as this is both true and untrue) that Mao was able to articulate in full force 200 years later – it is right to rebel against reactionaries.
p102
Rousseau comments on his experience of servitude when, as a young man he was employed by the Countess de Vercellis. “She judged me less by what I was than by what she had made me; and since she saw in me nothing but a lackey, she prevented me appearing to her in any other light.” “But” continues Berman, “he himself had collaborated in the falsification, by acting as if her image were true.”
This objectification, and creation of a demeaned other in the process, continues today in all areas of life. What is different is that the individual has assumed centre stage and demands expression in ways unimaginable 250 years ago. How the individual exists or is portrayed in media etc – their central role in soaps, for example, are indicators of this development. While the ‘making’ aspect still applies it is now done much more consciously (because there is no other solution). This needs more teasing out………
p103
That the Countess could have this effect underscored to Rousseau that he needed recognition – that he could be himself only to the degree that his self identity was confirmed by others. That which they did not recognise he could not assert. To Rousseau this suggested that others could mould people into whatever shape one wanted, and in a traditional hierarchy this power was held by the hereditary ruling classes – those at the bottom were forced to define themselves according to the terms dictated from above.
While this seems obvious, Rousseau’s conclusions came from a very personal experience via an examination of self. His conclusions indicate that he already had a well established self capable of self reflection and autonomous action. His ability to be self analytical and to resist sprang from that well.
It also indicates that resistance to ruling class pressure that distorts identity a la Rousseau’s experience begins in the individual (there must be formed individuals of which modern societies generate by the truck load) and then taken to a mass arena.
Another take on this: OK, so one can be moulded by the ruling class; this is old news. The interesting bit is the resistance. This was based upon the existence of an autonomous self, who drew the lessons and grew in strength. Today we are a much harder bunch to mould. The autonomous individual is churned out by the truck load. But this means that ‘we’ or, rather, ‘they’ will resist being moulded by us too. If we pigeon-hole whole bunches of people along simplistic class lines without recognising and respecting their individuality, we will be making a rod for our own individual and collective back.
Another aspect here springs from our social nature. We define ourselves in relation to the other. Developmentally the self is created through the interplay of the infant/child and external ‘objects’/subjects. Without recognition there is no self and therefore no individual. The question is not whether recognition is needed, but from whom/what and with what aim.
p114
Traditional societies pigeon hole people; their identities are ascribed and fixed within very narrow limits
Modern societies enable identities to be achieved and transcended. Limits, roles are transcended regularly and to such a degree we barely notice. Your average Joe at work transcends himself out of work – is he a junior sports coach, team manager, assistant this or that, the secretary of a club, an amateur whatever, a blogger etc. How about a revolutionary? Now, that’s a novel idea!
Modern society has made it possible for the first time in our history for people to be themselves, to define and create their lives as they see fit, to create lives authentically their own. And modern capitalist society both enables and prevents this.

p129
Cultural authoritarianism of the 18th C – Berman mentions the political Newtonian physics, used to promote ideas of clockwork perfection in science, everything in its place etc and neo-Classicism in the arts – was aimed at accustoming people to submit to fixed, eternal rules, externally imposed, closed to scrutiny… It’s an interesting idea – a defacto, partial, ideological united front between a decaying French feudalism and an ascendant British capitalism. The point of unity was the need for social stability. The British ruling class was largely successful in this quest because they had had a revolution; their French counterparts were not because they hadn’t. It’s also a consequence of the ER being forcibly stopped where it was. As social/economic developments continued to gather pace, the ruling class was attracted to and also had a need, to dust off ideas of stability and of permanently fixed social roles that they had challenged so successfully when the feudalists held sway.
This following quote has relevance for today:
By teaching to order and evaluate their experience according to received conventions, culture was depriving them of their strongest weapon against political oppression and social exploitation: their sense of self.
This was made regarding Rousseau’s evaluation of pre revolutionary France, albeit a Paris in the early throws of modernity. But the comment regarding culture stands alone. Culture that draws its authority from a closed and oppressive past cannot prepare or aid its members to negotiate the permanently turbulent waters that modernity throws up. For such cultures, the future has already happened and all it does is prepare people for another round of the same.

p131
Rousseau saw modernity as possessing a paradoxical character: “as both the nadir of man’s self alienation and, simultaneously, the medium for his full self-liberation.” Yep, got it in one – well, almost. Seeing it as a paradox denies its dialectical nature although it is unfair to be critical of Rousseau here as he precedes Hegel. He deserves our gratitude for seeing both aspects of this ‘paradox’ which, as an 18th C thinker puts him one up on most the left thinkers of the following two, for, with notable exceptions, only one aspect or the other has been focused upon and only very rarely has their dialectical nature been understood. The left has been particularly guilty of this as it is they who have claimed the mantle of Marx’s critique. This includes the revolutionary left as well as the reformist.

pp158-9
Some interesting ideas here:
To overcome self alienation Rousseau understood that this (modern) social system (although I don’t think he understood it as capitalist), in the course of its own development, had created a mode of consciousness that was capable of transcending it. (He gets a cigar for this very profound insight). Re this, Rousseau drew upon his view that modern men inherently strove to transform their thoughts into practise (another cigar) and that, therefore, their alienation could be overcome via their consciousness being transformed into self consciousness (half a cigar because of the link to individuality and autonomy). In this way they may be able to solve their personal and social problems through reforms from within (no cigar). He hoped “to draw from the evil itself the remedy that can cure it.” (A dialectical view, but not a sophisticated one – a few puffs on somebody else’s cigar for this one).
It seems to me that Rousseau is swinging between idealist and materialist frameworks, anticipating, in some ways, Hegel. His dialectical thinking comes close, but there is no cigar because he is unable (by nearly a century) to link his observations and analysis of modernity to the economic relations driving it. Without this the slide into idealist solutions becomes seductive.